After their critically acclaimed debut album Look and Behold (2011) and follow-up Monstrorum Historia (2013), Lo!, hailing from Sydney, Australia, are back with a new EP: The Tongueless.
2014 was a big year for Lo! In Australia: the band supported Trivium, In Flames, Corrosion Of Conformity and Torche, to name a few. Besides the massive live presence on their continent, Lo started working on new material, immediately after the departure of former vocalist Jamie-Leigh Smith in late 2013.
”Stylistically I aimed for a harsher, more venomous tone as Lo!'s voice”, says new vocalist Sam Dillon. “Lyrically I was looking towards
themes of extinction and mankind's extreme ignorance towards creatures. The track 'Orca' was inspired by the 'Blackfish' documentary highlighting the history of killer whales in captivity.”
The songs were originally put together starting with drummer Griffin and guitar player Whitbread instant messaging drum licks and guitar riffs to flesh out ideas... between Hong Kong, where Griffin lives, and Sydney, where the rest of the band is based.
The Tongueless was recorded at Adversary Studios in Sydney, mixed by Whitbread himself and mastered by Brad Boatright from Audiosiege (Old Man Gloom, Nails, Baptists). “We kept the recording process as natural as we could – the drums were all tracked live without a click with all of us in the same room”, says Whitbread. “We tried to rely on as little processing as possible and really paid attention to nailing the sounds we wanted at the beginning. Vocal wise, Sam prefers to use a handheld mic when recording so we used that approach this time which really added to the natural vibe.”
One of the refreshing things about this band is the way they weave different styles of music into their own, heavy garment: there are plenty of faster parts, relentlessly driven by heavy- hitting drummer Adrian Griffin's extraordinary playing, but there are also slow, doomy, atmospheric passages that suck the listener deep into Lo!'s dark cosmos.
“Lo! have come to remind you of glorious times, times when Mastodon were using samples of Jurassic Park to kick off their records”, Metal Hammer (UK) wrote about Lo!, and TheMusic.Com.Au adds: “Lo! are our scene's finest proponents of sludgy hardcore and live are akin to a cinder block to the cranium.”
The band have released a video clip for the track Orca, produced by bass player Adrian Shapiro himself, who is a well-known movie producer in Australia. “The video shoot was definitely more professional than we were expecting”, says Whitbread. “When director Matt Divine approached us with his idea for the clip, we were expecting it to all be shot in someone’s backyard on a Sunday afternoon. But of course Shapiro being a producer there was no way this wasn’t going to be done properly and professionally. So we had a full camera and lighting crews, a massive sound stage complete with harnesses and a stunt coordinator.”